Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (65 page)

And many GOP senators did. On June 27, 2013, after months of negotiation, the
Senate passed an immigration reform bill by an overwhelming vote, 68 to 32. All the Democrats voted for it, and so did 14 Republicans. Among the Republican supporters was a favorite of the Tea Party and one of the party’s young conservative hopes, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Not only did Rubio vote for the bill; he was closely involved in the discussions leading up to it. For once Obama could bring back his one-America theme and describe something that had actually happened in Washington with support from both parties.
“The bipartisan bill that passed today was a compromise,” he said. “By definition, nobody got everything they wanted. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not me.”

And then the bill died. Repeatedly, Speaker John Boehner signaled the White House that he wanted to act on immigration reform. But nothing happened. Republican senators representing relatively large constituencies—including those, like Rubio, a Cuban-American whose White House dreams made him think of the largest constituency of all—could think not only about GOP primary electorates, but also about the party’s need to make peace with Latinos. And many of them, particularly John McCain, had long supported
immigration reform on principle. They thought their party might be ready to join them after Mitt Romney’s Hispanic and Asian shellacking.

But the Republican House was a different creature. There the Tea Party influence remained strong, and the Tea Party’s supporters were resolutely against any measure they saw as rewarding the lawbreaking of illegal immigrants. Boehner, however much his pro-business Republicanism inclined him toward a bill that the party’s corporate interests and Chamber of Commerce members longed for, was not about to threaten his own job by putting a bill on the floor that would enrage his right wing. Immigration reform’s supporters said repeatedly, and they were right, that the Senate bill could almost certainly have passed the House because there were enough Republicans—albeit a minority in their party—ready to join almost all of the Democrats to push it through. Boehner wouldn’t do it. And Rubio, suddenly finding himself under a scalding attack from his onetime allies in the Tea Party, steadily backed off his own creation and leaned further away still as the primary campaign went on.

Nothing would happen on immigration until Obama acted unilaterally. And, to the growing consternation of his Latino allies, he would wait to act until after the 2014 election. The Tea Party had won another one.

In the summer and fall of 2013, the fevers returned to Washington in full force, once again sparked by budget matters, although the budget itself was not really the central issue. At stake was the Republicans’ determination to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

That the House felt obligated to vote dozens of times to repeal “Obamacare” was a source of amusement to critics of conservatism. Why wasn’t once enough? But there was a logic to their grand quest. As a political matter, the health law was Obama’s largest policy monument. The reforms of Dodd-Frank were important—Republicans wanted to repeal those, too—but they were complicated, not widely understood, and still subject to a bureaucratically intricate rule-making process. The stimulus, which they had demonized with great success, was a thing of the past. But if Obamacare endured and succeeded, it would be an achievement that Democrats would keep pointing back to, much as they touted Social Security and Medicare. All would be seen as decisive uses of government to reduce the anxieties created by the workings of a market economy.

And if Obamacare endured, it would represent a major extension of the American welfare state. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion was a direct government program, unmediated by insurance exchanges and private insurances companies. Many conservative governors continued to resist it, empowered by the 2012 Supreme Court decision that upheld Obamacare’s constitutionality but allowed states to turn down the Medicaid expansion without losing the rest of their Medicaid funds. The Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act and partly gutted it at the same time.

The Medicaid expansion was also, from a conservative point of view, insidiously attractive, since it was paid for almost entirely with federal funds. As one Republican governor after another decided to buck conservative ideologues and take the money to support their local hospitals and insure their neediest citizens, the dangers loomed ever larger. And the plan’s market-oriented part, involving subsidies for the purchase of private insurance, could easily be expanded gradually. The trajectory that many on the left foresaw was also visible to the right: over time, government would have to play a larger and larger role in the provision of health care.

And the 2012 elections brought a new voice to Washington who was determined to be the hero of Obamacare’s demise. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had defeated a more moderate conservative in the Republican primary and stormed into Washington set upon making himself the loudest and most insistent voice of uncompromising Tea Party conservatism—all by way of preparing for the presidential run he would launch in March 2015. Cruz quickly saw that his boisterous and self-promoting ways did not sit well with his Republican Senate colleagues. One might fairly ask: how is Cruz any different and what would the Senate be without self-promotion? Cruz’s colleagues would readily answer that self-promotion is perfectly acceptable as long as it is carried out under certain rules of decorum and with due regard for the political interests of colleagues. Cruz was apparently never shown the rulebook.

And so he allied himself with the most fervent conservatives in the House, crossing over to the other side of Capitol Hill to meet with them at Tortilla Coast and other House watering holes and dining venues. If this did not sit well with Cruz’s Senate colleagues, it did not please John Boehner, either. The Speaker didn’t much like the community organizer in the White House, and
he surely did not want a Senate-based community organizer inciting House colleagues who were ready to rebel without any additional encouragement.

Cruz himself embodied the conservatives’ double-sided message on Obamacare. They had to insist that it wasn’t working and could not possibly work. But their real fear was that it would
succeed
. In an interview on Fox News in July, Cruz gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that
“Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.” Keeping uninsured Americans with obviously addictive personalities from getting “hooked” on Obamacare was an urgent task.

The Cruz-led patriots of the Tea Party thus engineered a government shutdown that began on October 1, 2013. Their position: they would not vote to fund the federal government unless the bill in question repealed or postponed Obamacare. Boehner warned his colleagues that the shutdown was a bad idea and wouldn’t work. But when they wouldn’t listen, he ran to the head of the army he thought was moving in the wrong direction and led them off the cliff. It was the beginning of what the conservative writer Marc Thiessen called
“The Seinfeld Shutdown” because it really was, in the end, about nothing.

The episode represented a very curious way to approach, or perhaps to avoid, governing. Repealing Obamacare the normal way—the constitutional way, as Tea Partiers might have said under other circumstances—required passing a bill in two houses and getting the president to sign it. There was virtually no chance of the Senate passing such a bill and absolutely no chance that Obama would repeal his own program. Only extraordinary means could get the job done. Therefore, in the peculiar logic of the right, financing government in the normal, constitutional way came to be seen as a “concession” because anything that kept Obamacare on the books was a “concession.” Many nonradical conservatives fully understood how bizarre this approach was.
“It’s a dead end,” said Representative Peter King, the crusty Long Island Republican who had no patience for the foolishness.

But this confrontation was different from others in the earlier Obama
years because Republicans were badly divided while Democrats were united. In this sense, the political temperature had dropped, even if the fever was not entirely broken. Many Republicans had buyer’s remorse even before the adventure began.

It was also different because the GOP had caused fiscal chaos over an issue quite apart from normal budget wrangling and made a demand that most of them knew would never be met. The new health care system was up and running the very day the shutdown began. This would cause problems later, but at the time, it undercut the Republicans’ case. And Republicans had no coherent strategy, as many of them privately acknowledged. As one adviser to the leadership put it to me at the time, they were laying track just ahead of the train as it roared forward.

Finally, it was different because Obama was different. In the past, he had always been ready to negotiate and typically went out of his way never to cast showdowns in partisan terms. This time, he freely called out “House Republicans” as the culprits and confidently asserted that serious talks could take place only if Republicans stopped using threats to the country’s well-being as bargaining levers.

During the shutdown,
800,000 government employees were furloughed and 1.3 million had to report to work without knowing how they’d be paid. In response to pressure, Republicans announced they would pay the furloughed workers for having done no work. It was an odd contradiction for the small-government party, and another way in which the shutdown was about nothing.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell stated the obvious: the House’s strategy, he said, had gone “awry.” The affair finally ended on October 16 when the House passed a Senate bill that reopened the government.
All 198 Democrats who voted favored it. Among Republicans, 87 voted yes and 144 voted no—the latter being, in effect, a vote to continue the shutdown. Once again, the Republican leadership had to rely mostly on Democrats to get itself out of a scrape and to carry out the duties of governing.

And so the shutdown reached its inevitable failure for all who had promoted it, and for a leadership that had acquiesced to it.
The turning point may have been an NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll released on October 10
showing the Republican Party’s positive rating at 24 percent, its lowest ever to that point, while President Obama’s rating had risen slightly, to 47 percent. And Republicans were staring at a potential political catastrophe in 2014: By a margin of 47 percent to 39 percent, the public said it preferred a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress. In July, the two parties had been tied.

Beneath these numbers was another instructive shift. Positive feelings toward the Tea Party fell to 21 percent, down from 34 percent at the movement’s peak in June 2010. The Tea Party had lost well over one-third of its friends.

Democrats were elated, but their elation did not last long. The HealthCare.gov website had crashed on its very first day of operation, October 1. But the problems with the website emerged slowly and did not become fully obvious until after the shutdown ended. They promptly took over the news. Day after day, stories about unconscionable delays, crashes, recriminations among officials and contractors dominated the airwaves and the newspapers. Obamacare’s foes came off defense and were suddenly back on the attack—and this time, the administration’s mishandling of the rollout gave them live ammunition.

On October 21, Obama went to the Rose Garden to admit the obvious.
“Of course, you’ve probably heard that HealthCare.gov—the new website where people can apply for health insurance, and browse and buy affordable plans in most states—hasn’t worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work,” he said with mild understatement. He spoke for a half hour, trying hard to defend the Affordable Care Act and to describe the benefits and relief it was bringing to so many Americans. But his defensiveness was palpable. “Let me remind everybody that the Affordable Care Act is not just a website,” he said almost plaintively. “It’s much more.”

Although the website was eventually fixed and the ACA went on to cover tens of millions, the damage done in that period was incalculable. Politically, the snafu immediately moved the spotlight away from Republican dysfunction and toward the administration’s failures. There was no telling whether the strong Democratic poll numbers immediately after the shutdown would have persisted into the 2014 campaign, but the ACA’s troubles guaranteed they would not. The fact that government had failed in one of the basic
tasks of setting up access to an insurance system ratified classic conservative complaints about bureaucratic failure and incompetence. Not for the first time did liberals learn that they had more of an interest than anyone in promoting government efficiency and performance.

And the website crash was the administration’s second self-inflicted blow that fall. The first came in late August and early September when it emerged that Syria had used chemical weapons against its internal foes.
At a news conference on August 20, 2012, Obama had said that “we have been very clear to the [Bashar al-] Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The president had resisted getting the United States deeply engaged in Syria’s civil war—it would emerge that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton favored stronger American intervention—but on August 20, the president spoke what would prove to be fateful words about the use of chemical weapons: “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

A little over a year later, he was stuck with his red line, and he announced that he planned air strikes against Syria. And to the surprise of many, including Congress, he also said he would seek congressional authorization for his action. He won almost immediate support from Boehner and Eric Cantor, but widespread opposition to giving Obama the authority he sought emerged quickly, particularly in the House. Resistance came not only from dovish Democrats but also from many Republicans. Some were opposed because they held broadly anti-interventionist views, others simply because they mistrusted Obama. In the end, the issue was never directly joined because Obama picked up on a Russian proposal to negotiate a voluntary surrender of chemical weapons by the Assad government.